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Ramen Noodle Salad Recipe

Truth be told, I don’t cook as much as you think I do. And, perhaps much to your disbelief, I don’t eat as good as it appears to be. Well, not every day.

Like many of you who has a busy and hectic lifestyle, I eat too much unhealthy food, for example: instant noodles or ramen. My pantry is constantly choked full of various kinds of instant noodles: imported ramen noodle from Asia and my favorite American cup noodles. The alarming thing about eating ramen noodle is not about the noodle, but the fact that I’m addicted to the flavoring packet in every single ramen: Penang laksa, Thai tom yum, curry, miso, and so on. I always slurp the MSG-loaded and “sure-to-make-you-bald” (my late mother used to tell me) ramen noodle soup to the very last drop.

When my conscience hits, I try to make my ramen noodle healthy to disguise my guilt for eating malnutrition food. That’s when I try to rid the flavoring packet and make ramen noodle salad.

Ramen noodle salad is a very simple recipe–as the name suggests, it’s a quick dish that you can whip up by combining ramen noodle + salad. I make my ramen noodle salad with shredded cabbage, mayonnaise, spicy chili sauce (you can also use Tabasco sauce) and some seasonings. A simple recipe with almost no artificial flavorings–OK, I confess, just a wee bit.

The next time if you feel bad about consuming too much instant noodle, try my ramen noodle salad recipe. It’s actually not half bad.

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I think the flavor packet is the best part too! It sure saves the hassle of making your own stock, buying sauces… Everything’s instant! But yeah, even if you don’t go bald, it’s still important to keep it healthy :) So that salad looks like a delicious respite!

You make a packet of instant ramen look like fancy food with this salad. I’m also a big fan of instant ramen and eat it far too often than I should. And yeah, the MSG packet is bad and I’ve been told that the noodles are also bad because they’ve been fried too. Double warning about instant ramen, eh? ;)

Some shredded steamed meat or shredded omelette would be great! I make my instant noodles pretty premium with extra extra ingredients that can be found in the fridge just to avoid feeling guilty about eating them ;o) I find instant noodles delicious.

Very simply, ramen is what they call hand-pulled noodle in Japan. In China it’s called “la mian”, and in Korea it is ramyun. Instant noodle is instant noodle. In Malaysia noodle is mee, mein, or mian, depending on your dialect.

You can’t buy a pack of 90 sen pack of Maggie Mee and make a dish of ramen. It is not hand-pulled noodle as seen in Japanese restaurants, and it is far from the sort you see in Naruto cartoons. Besides, how does the above qualify as a ramen without a single slice of naruto?

Nowadays, the best tasting ramen is prepared in a very greasy soup. This stock takes hours to make, if not days. In the ramen stock one would normally find pig flavour, having been made of mass quantity of pig bone. The resulting broth has the colour and opacity of milk. As intoxicating as it sounds, it is the soup that ramen lovers savour, the noodle serves as little more than a filler.

Again, if it’s Maggie or Cintan packets, let’s have a bit of national pride and just call it “mee”. The Maggie or Cintan may be unhealthy and might stay edible past a nuclear winter. However it is still good for those exam-cramming nights, and definitely a godsend to households who subsist on minimal wages. Mee may not be as glamorous or middle-upper class sounding as “ramen” clearly is these days, but it is a good honest name for sustenance. And it is true to our roots.